What would you do with an extra $1,800 a year in your nonprofit’s budget?

That’s the question Parents Helping Parents (PHP) answered when they moved their website from WP Engine to AWS using DevPanel. The result? Zero hosting costs, drastically improved development workflows, stronger security, and a more empowered technical team.

This blog post summarizes their journey and shows how DevPanel can make the cloud accessible even without deep AWS expertise. If you’re running a nonprofit, startup, or small business, this is one cloud migration story you don’t want to miss.

👉 [Download the full case study here]

The Challenge: Limited Flexibility, High Costs

PHP is a San Jose–based nonprofit that supports families raising children with disabilities. Their website is mission-critical—hosting a member portal, event registration, donation forms, and email integrations. But their previous host, WP Engine, was becoming a constraint.

Here’s what they were up against:

• $150/month in hosting fees ($1,800/year)—a significant cost for a nonprofit.
  
• Only one dev/staging site, which bottlenecked development and testing.
  
• Outdated plugins and custom code that risked breaking on new PHP versions.
  
• No advanced security features unless they paid extra.
  
• No real way to scale without upgrading to expensive enterprise plans.
  

Despite being on a “managed” host, PHP’s technical debt was piling up. Volunteers struggled to onboard, QA was painful, and updates were too risky to apply regularly. Something had to change.

The Solution: AWS Infrastructure + DevPanel Automation

The answer came in two parts:

1. AWS for cloud hosting (leveraging $5,000/year in nonprofit credits).
   
2. DevPanel to automate infrastructure and simplify DevOps workflows.
   

This combination gave PHP the cost savings of self-hosted cloud with the ease-of-use of a managed platform.

Here’s what that looked like in action:

✅ Zero Out-of-Pocket Hosting Costs

Thanks to AWS credits for nonprofits, PHP eliminated their $1,800/year hosting bill. The full cost of servers, storage, and bandwidth is now covered by AWS.

✅ Unlimited Development Environments

DevPanel unlocked a game-changing benefit: every Git branch could have its own cloud-based environment. This allowed parallel development and testing—something impossible with WP Engine’s single staging site.

✅ Cloud-Based Development in the Browser

DevPanel’s browser-based VS Code editor meant PHP’s rotating team of volunteer developers could start coding in minutes, without setting up a local environment. Onboarding time dropped from 5+ days to less than one.

✅ Improved Security and Performance

• Cloudflare CDN + WAF improved page speeds and blocked 100–200 attacks per week.
  
• Automated backups, logs, and alerts provided better visibility and peace of mind.
  
• Upgraded WordPress, plugins, and custom code during the migration made the site safer and faster.
  

✅ Freedom and Control

PHP now owns its AWS infrastructure. There’s no vendor lock-in, and their team can configure, scale, and deploy exactly how they need—with DevPanel simplifying the process.

The Migration: Smooth, Strategic, and Safe

PHP’s migration journey took 6 weeks, including planning, testing, and code updates. DevPanel helped every step of the way:

• Week 1: Audited their WP Engine setup, planned migration strategy, created rollback plan.
  
• Week 2: Set up AWS infrastructure via DevPanel.
  
• Weeks 2–4: Upgraded WordPress core/plugins and cleaned up legacy code in isolated dev environments.
  
• Week 4: Final data migration (database + media).
  
• Week 5: Extensive staging and QA.
  
• Week 6: DNS cutover, go-live, post-launch monitoring.
  

Thanks to the ability to spin up unlimited test environments, the team was able to work in parallel, test everything thoroughly, and ensure no user disruption.

The Results: More Than Just Cost Savings

💸 100% Reduction in Hosting Costs

PHP went from paying $1,800/year to $0 out-of-pocket, redirecting those funds to mission-critical programs.

🚀 28–30% Faster Page Loads

Homepage load time dropped from 3.2s to 2.3s. Logged-in portal pages sped up as well, thanks to optimized code and modern PHP versions.

👨‍💻 80–90% Faster Onboarding for Developers

Cloud-based dev environments let volunteers start contributing immediately. No more local setups, no more delays.

🔒 Stronger Security Posture

WAF protection, regular updates, DDoS mitigation, and Cloudflare edge security blocked threats before they reached the server.

🔁 Modern DevOps with CI/CD

Staging and production rollouts are now smoother, faster, and safer with DevPanel’s CI/CD integration. Small changes are tested and deployed frequently, improving site stability.

🌱 Internal Empowerment and Growth

With full access to their AWS environment, PHP’s team is more confident and capable. They troubleshoot faster, deploy smarter, and enjoy complete control—without relying on vendor support tickets.

Who Should Read This Case Study?

This isn’t just a story for tech teams. If you’re:

• A nonprofit leader trying to stretch your IT budget
  
• A CTO or dev manager frustrated by hosting limits
  
• A developer tired of broken workflows and clunky staging environments
  
• A founder looking to modernize your web infrastructure without a DevOps army
  

…then this case study is worth your time.

It shows how a small team—with limited budget and no full-time sysadmin—can pull off a world-class cloud migration using the right tools.

Key Takeaways for Decision-Makers

• You don’t need AWS expertise to run secure, scalable websites on AWS—DevPanel handles the hard parts.
  
• Cloud credits (like AWS for Nonprofits) are a powerful way to reduce costs without sacrificing performance.
  
• A migration is a great time to modernize—update your code, adopt CI/CD, and clean house.
  
• Unlimited dev/staging environments unlock agility your team may never have experienced before.
  
• Volunteer developers thrive when you remove friction from the process.
  

Final Thoughts: More Impact, Less Overhead

PHP’s story is one of digital transformation done right. They didn’t just save money—they gained superpowers. And they did it without a dedicated DevOps team, thanks to DevPanel.

If your organization wants to spend less time worrying about servers and more time serving your mission…

👉 Download the full case study to learn more. Or better yet, contact us for a 15-minute demo and see how DevPanel can help your team do more—with less.